I have mentioned this previously, in my very long posting about my trip to Hawaii, but I wanted to officially count it in my list of things that I learned this year! The most important things that I learned about surfing were that it’s really important to paddle like hell once you see the wave you want to go for to get up enough speed that when you jump up, your board is going fast enough, that you jump up at just the right time (too late or too soon and you are going to go for a swim!), and that jumping up to standing actually isn’t that hard.

Snorkeling

Same goes for snorkeling, Prior to my trip to Hawaii, I’d never snorkeled before. Turns out, snorkeling is pretty easy (made even easier by the fact that we bought snorkels that have a value that prevents you from breathing in water when you dive down so that your snorkel is below the surface), but it’s still something that I learned.

Sewing Zippers

Last year I took a couple of sewing classes, making a tote bag and some fabric buckets. This year, my friends and I decided to kick it up a notch and sew zipper pouches – which meant we had to learn how to sew a zipper!

I made them with the leftover fabric from my tote bag, which is cool because (a) they match my tote bags, and (b) I managed to not lose the leftover fabric from my tote bag, which I made nearly a year before!

Mostly because my blog is my outsourced memory – if it’s not on the blog, I’ll never remember that it happened! [↩]

My mortgage broker sent me an (automated, I’m sure) “happy anniversary of having bought your condo” email, which is what reminded me that tomorrow is 4 years since I took possession of my humble abode. So I looked at my trusty mortgage countdown spreadsheet (because of course I have a spreadsheet) and according to my calculations, I have paid off 53% of my mortgage principal in 4 years. Not too bad, if I do say so myself. Of course, I ridiculously lucked out when I bought this place – the price was very good1, plus I have a few different source of income in addition to my day job, so I have had the luxury of being able to make lump sum payments. Also, I’ve had very little in the way of additional expenses, as my unit has been very well taken care of and the strata does an excellent job of maintaining the building.

Given that the Greater Vancouver real estate market continued to rise at an insane rate since I bought, I’m actually in the position where I own an even bigger proportion of the place than I would otherwise. When I bought the place, I made a 25% downpayment, meaning the bank technically owned 75% of my place. If the price of the place had stayed the same over the past four years, I would now own 65% of my place and the bank would own 35%. But since the value of the place has gone up, I now own 77% of the place if we use the most recent assessed value (which is what the province assessed my place as being worth as of July 1, 2017). If we use the average amount that units in my building that are identical to mine have sold for in the past few months2 (assuming that I could sell my place for that price), I currently own a whopping 82% of my place and the bank owns a mere 18%. It’s a weird situation – I like to remind myself that the “value” of my place is really all just theoretical given that I’m not planning to sell anytime soon. But it does give me the opportunity to do some fun math! #nerdery

Anyway, my next hurdle is that I’ll have to renegotiate my mortgage next year, as my mortgage was a 5 year term. The interest rates are higher now than they were 4 years ago, so I’ll have to pay a higher interest rate. Boo-urns. I guess I have a year to figure out how all that works.

In the context of the time and place in which I bought it. It was an absolutely insane price if you compare it to just about anywhere else in the world. [↩]

Starting next week, I’ll be on holidays for a few weeks, but it will be mostly a stay-cation (though we might take a road trip for a few days somewhere, possibly the Sunshine Coast, since I haven’t been there before). If anyone else has time off in the next few weeks and is interested in going hiking during the week, hit me up!

I may or may not have also been catching Pokemon. Shut up – lots of people were doing it, including an adorable elderly couple! [↩]

A few weeks ago, I went to an evaluation conference and at said conference there was the live recording of an episode of a podcast that I listen to: Eval Cafe. It’s hosted by a colleague of mine, Carolyn Camman, and her colleague, Brian Hoessler. The theme of the conference was “co-creation” so Carolyn and Brian thought it would be cool to co-create a podcast with whichever conference attendees decided to show up to their thematic breakfast session (which are sessions that are held on the last morning of the conference where the “presenters” suggest a topic of their table and people discuss it. So Carolyn & Brian brought their podcasting equipment and recorded the discussion of what we’d all experienced at the conference). And I was one of those conference attendees!

It’s pretty specific to evaluation and nerdy, but if you are so inclined, you can listen to the podcast episode here. (For the record, it is quite different from the last time I was on a podcast!)

Two pictures today in honour of what would have been my dad’s 73 birthday. I think both of these things would have made my father proud.

First: me in a recent hockey game. There was a conference in town not to long ago that my workplace was involved with and part of this conference is that they host a pick up game of hockey. Even though I didn’t go to the conference, as it was focused on an area of research that I don’t do research in, I still got to play in the hockey game. I’m the short one in the dark jersey of the left.

And, of course, he’s a photo of me flagrantly disobeying a sign:

I’m feeling sad today, thinking about my dad. Too sad to write anything profound, so the pictures will have to suffice.

The office that I’m currently working in is a house that’s been converted to office space1. Yesterday at work we had a discussion about whether the bathroom door in said house should be open or closed when no one is in it. Whenever I see the bathroom door closed, I assume someone is in it so find myself going to another floor of the house to use a bathroom because I think someone is using the bathroom but then it turns out there isn’t anyone using it. But others in the office say that they always close the door to an empty bathroom because they think it’s weird to have an open bathroom door and/or that is the norm in their culture. So then we got into a discussion about it. My bathroom at home actually has two doors – that opens into the hallway and one that opens into my bedroom2. It’s actually a great design, because it means I have an en suite bathroom but also that guests don’t have to go into my bedroom to access the bathroom.)). The main reason that I keep the doors to the bathroom open when it’s not in use is actually because the cats like to do laps around the condo and that includes walking through the bedroom into the bathroom and then into the hallway (or vice versa) (I refer to this as “the cat highway.). One of my coworkers said she leaves her bathroom door open for airflow. So I said, “I leave my bathroom door open for cat flow!” It ended up being a mixed bag, with some of us who leave our bathroom doors open when the bathroom is unoccupied and some keeping it closed and also some discussion of couples where one person always leaves it open and the other person always closes it. And now I’m wondering which is more common, or is this something that people are pretty split on? Thoughts?